We were further sickened to learn of another Microsoft connection traced back to last December. There is now concrete proof that underground cult KDE on Cygwin is engaging a truly unholypursuit in a rather foolish attempt at cloning.

It's only natural for them to do it. Maybe they already did internally. This will be interesting if they decide to use Qt for their other products. Look at Acrobat Reader it works on both Linux and Windows, so that could help them and better integration with KDE.

AFAICT, Acrobat Reader for Linux is written in Motif (or something similar). It's not a Qt app... Also, don't forget that although KDE is based on Qt, the fact that an app is written in Qt doesn't necessarily mean it will integrate with KDE well.

"the fact that an app is written in Qt doesn't necessarily mean it will integrate with KDE well."

The first question you need to ask is what needs to be integrated? For most end-user applications, very little is needed. The only thing I can think of that I would like to see in terms of acroread and integration is drag-and-drop. But that's standardized now, so there's no need to make it a KDE application to get it.

The "look-and-feel" is a different beast entirely, so I won't discuss it here.

Sone more:
* The filedialog. It's a very common task to open/save files. But Qt / KDE filedialogs are very different (look&feel, shortcuts, bookmarks, preview...).
* Many common icons are differnt (open, save, copy, paste,...).
* Qt's printer-dialog is very simple compared to KDE's one.
* more dialogs...

Those are visible differences, every user sees. And with this differences Qt-applications do not seem to be "integrated" to your system.

Adobe uses a lot of energy to do Windows and Mac versions of there Software. I think the primary goal is to reduce the effort. A secondary object is to have Linux/Unix-versions available, when Adobe thinks it's time to sell them.

Um... what is this story about? Can we re-summarize in a way that requires me to traverse maybe one link? And written in a comprehensible manner? As it is it looks like someone's very poor attempt at a joke.

The language is colorful indeed, but I'm very confused.
It looks like there might be something of interest in
there, but I'm not sure I want to invest the effort to
click through _19_ links to try to figure it out.

Stupidity?
Ok, folks calm down.
I think the problem here is that this news article
is also read by an international/non-english-speaking audience
which perhaps doesn't completely understand the subtle humour /
irony and is therefore somewhat confused.
Well, I liked it and I think it's important that we all don't
take this too seriously. We are not M$ after all so we can
be a bit more relaxed... ;-)
If this article isn't for you - just
ignore it.
Especially the part about the relationship and "divorce"
of the two dinosaurs was quite a good idea and made my LOL.
Keep up the good work.

"Qt rocks. Lots of people are starting to give it more and more attention. But not Mozilla."

I think that's about it.

Expanded version (see links in story for more):
- IBM is rumored to be exploring/investing more in Qt.
- Adobe apparently based their Photo Album on it.
- Qt-Win32 is cooking along as part of the KDE on Windows project.
- Mozilla dropped the Qt native port because of a lack of maintenance (it hasn't kept up with the rest of Mozilla since 0.9.9 apparently)

Hmm.. It is only "funny" if you know what the stories are already, and you happen to be called Beavis or Butthead. Even now I'm still not sure if I have got everything:

- Article comparing MFC to QT
- Article on using QT with Python
- IBM using QT in embedded development platform
- Adobe using QT for one of their apps.
- Port of the GPL version of QT to Windows is making progress
- Support for building mozilla against QT is finally removed after being unmaintained (and broken) for some time.

Average users are unwilling to learn, have difficulty finding the Start-button, and can barely use Internet Explorer. Surely you don't expect the people that KDE is targeting to understand language like that, do you?
Before you know it, you will be flooded by "the KDE community is full of elitists"-trolls again.

Oh whatever, whine whine whine. One article and it is the end of KDE as we know it?

Relax. I didn't lose any information, you've just got to click to find it. And the people who don't understand it, they don't care about Qt anyway right? GNOME posts messages like these all the time. Maybe mine was a little too subtle, but at least some people got it. :-)

It's called multi-level humour and I just used the tabloid style as a vehicle... obviously many people didn't even recognise the outrageous tabloid style... it's quite an institution in the US/UK/etc.

The Qt version of Mozilla was dropped because.. well, there wasn't enough developer interest to keep it maintained. There were calls for people to maintain it, but I guess nobody stepped up to the plate.

Oh well, at least two of the three "alternative" browsers use Qt.. Opera and Konq/Safari.

Why was there such panic to get it removed? Why couldn't it be left in there to "brew" a bit and get patches applied by the new contributors so that it would reach a stage where it compiles? It definitely will never be brought up to the same state as the other ports again as it was nuked into orbit.

It hasn't to be fully functional but give us the proof that it starts faster, looks nicer, is easier to develop and that it runs on all platforms that are already supported.

Well, how would my Mozilla look like with AA-fonts, Skypilot Classic Theme in QT, kdeprint-management...

The code is open but perhaps it is too big to make facts on your own ;-)

Damn, opera is always under construction (crashes,java1.4) while I think that konqueror is really usable now in 3.1. (Just tell my why Java + Konqueror works correctly only in KDE and not in my icewm [seperate applet windows])

Loading klipper or any other qt-app after a fresh boot may take 20 seconds to load all libs and services but after that it's very fast and I have all other apps in 3 seconds.

Even my Moneyplex uses qt statically but I think it looks to much like windows without kde-support :-)

actually, to whatever extent it wasn't buggy, the QT mozilla would look and behave exactly the same as the glib/xlib one. Mozilla uses it's own widget set (for reasons both good and bad) and the QT port didn't change that, it just used QT to make the implementation of that widget set portable. However, this forgoes most of the good reasons to like QT, so I'm not surprised nobody was interested.

The current status is that Qt 2.3 is being ported. It's partially functional and when it's done, Qt3 will be ported (hopefully this will be easy once Qt 2.3 is done). I believe after that, efforts to port KDE and KDE apps will begin.

It worked when I first tried it with the new homepage, so it must have been some recent changes. Please make it standard again. I like to shove it in the face of my friends who say good looking web pages cannot be done with standards only.

Well, I've used this site as an example way too many times before, and it looks prettier now and no longer passes the validator test. See what I mean?
I can understand the web master making a mistake, or simply not caring about standards that much, but he owe us, - "we", the ones who shoved kde homepage down our friends throats, as an example of nice web pages development, promoting the kde web page and kde itself as we did that -, the right to keep on doing it!

fixed ;)
Please keep in mind the page is maintained by volunteers, there can sometimes be some bug in the code, but that will be fixed in a very short timespan normally :)
Simply tell your friends: here, the page looks good, validates well the most time and if not, it gets fixed ;)